Richard Nixon gives the crowd a pair of Vs for victory as he stands before the GOP Convention in Miami Beach on Aug. 9, 1968, to make his acceptance speech. About two months later Nixon was elected president of the United States.

The election was so close that the New York Times had two wait until Thursday to run the headline above to announce the winner.

It had been about six years earlier when he lost the California gubernatorial race to Pat Brown. Nixon famously blamed the media for favoring his opponent, saying, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.”

Well, it turned out the “gentlemen” of the press had many more opportunities to kick Nixon around in his 1&frac12 terms that ended in 1974 when Nixon resigned from office after covering up a third-rate burglary at the Democratic headquarters at the Watergate in Washington, D.C.

Nixon was re-elected in 1972 and less than a year later his vice president Spiro T. Agnew resigned amid charges of bribery, tax evasion and money laundering. On the positive side, Nixon ended the draft in June 1973, and visited China and Russia. On March 29, 1973, the last U.S. troops withdrew from Vietnam as Nixon declares “the day we have all worked and prayed for has finally come.”

Presidential scholars, liberal and conservative, generally agree that Nixon presents a special problem when seeking to evaluate and determine his presidential ranking because his foreign policy and domestic policy successes stand in dramatic contradiction to the corrupt elements in his administration.

A Rasmussen Reports poll taken June 13-24 of 2007 found that only two presidents were viewed unfavorably by at least 50% of the 1,000 respondents. They were: George W. Bush (66% unfavorable) and Richard Nixon (60% unfavorable)

I turned 19 the day before the 1968 election. I had been driving legally since I was 16, I registered for the draft at 18, but I couldn’t legally buy booze or vote because I was not 21. I’m afraid that if I had been able to vote, I would have had to had a drink of some kind to wash the bad taste of voting out of my mouth.

For some reason I never could put my finger on, I always believed the Nixon wanted me and the others like me dead. Maybe it was just the paranoia of the times. In 1968, when he was elected, and 1969, when he took office, the Vietnam War was raging. Many of the peace-loving hippies had evolved into street-fighting radicals. I had drawn a high enough lottery number to be spared from the draft — 266 — but I believed the war needed to end and that Nixon, despite his secret plan to win, was not moving fast enough. I believe the years that Nixon was in office were probably the most difficult years of my life.

As the 2008 presidential campaign comes to an end, this song keeps running through my mind. I hope we don’t get fooled again. Gosh I’m glad all the Who didn’t die before they got old. This is from the Concert for New York City on Oct. 20, 2001. That’s Ringo Starr‘s son Zac Starkey on the drums. So now for your listening pleasure, Won’t Get Fooled Again: